Part 13

For a moment Ellison appeared to hesitate; there came again the queer look in his eyes, as of surprise, wonder, and a something more. There came a grating curse from Lunn; a sudden movement from the onlookers roundabout.

Ellison’s great paw closed on the extended hand with a grip of iron, as Rook’s voice rose, strident, under the lights:

“Bull—are you crazy? This man—he’s just—a dam’ _dick_!”

_CHAPTER TEN_

“IN THE NAME OF THE LAW!”

It was out. Rook, his hand in a lightning stab for Annister’s coat, turned over the lapel, holding it forward for all to see.

On it was a small gold badge—the symbol of the Secret Service. The secret was a secret no longer.

How long Rook had known of it Annister could not be certain, but now, at the growling chorus of swift hate, he whirled. His pistol came up and out, as there came a startling interruption, or rather, two.

He heard Ellison’s voice, roaring in the narrow room:

“Hell’s bells, young fellow, I’m with you, and you can lay to that! For this once, anyway! You sure can handle yourself!”

He turned to Rook and the rest. “Now—you bums, get goin’! Dick or no dick, I’ll play this hand as she lays. Get goin’!”

The great hand, holding a heavy Colt, swung upward on a line with Annister’s as the door burst inward with a crash; and, framed in the opening, there showed on a sudden the flaming thatch of the bartender, Del Kane.

His cowboy yell echoed throughout the room, eyes blazing upon the hotel man where he sat.

In two strides, he had joined Annister and Bull; guns on a line, the three fronted the five who faced them, silent, tense. Kane’s voice came clear:

“I followed you, Mr. Annister; thought they’d try t’ run a whizzer on yuh; I’m pullin’ m’ freight after today, anyway; Mister Lunn can have his job, an’ welcome! Now—I ben keepin’ cases on Mister Rook, he’s a curly wolf, ain’t you, Rook? A real bad hombre, an’ you can lay to that! But he ain’t goin’ northwest of nothin’, he ain’t.... Now, you dam’ short-horns, show some speed!”

But there was no fight in Rook, Lunn and Company. Glowering, their hands in plain sight, weaponless, they sat in a sullen silence, as Annister, backing to the doorway, was followed by Ellison and Kane. Outside, under pale stars, the giant spoke:

“I don’t aim to be too all-fired honest, Mister Annister,” he said. “I throwed in with Mister Rook, that’s so, but he’s played it both ends against the middle with me, I guess.... I reckon I’ll be movin’ out o’ Dry Bone in two—three hours.”

He grinned, wryly, out of the corner of his mouth.

“You sure pack a hefty wallop, young fellow! I wish I could tell you somethin’, but that man Rook, he’s as close-mouthed as an Indian, and that’s whatever! His game—nobody knows what it is—Lunn, maybe—but they sure got a strangle-hold on th’ county; it won’t be healthy for me here after tonight.”

The three men separated at the hotel, Annister entering the lobby with a curious depression that abruptly deepened to a sudden, crawling fear as a call-boy brought him a note. The fear was not for himself, but for another, for, although he had never seen the handwriting before, he knew it upon the instant.

Ripping open the envelope with fingers that trembled, he read, and at what he saw his face paled slowly to a mottled, unhealthy gray:

“_Partner_:

“_If you get this in time, please hurry. I’m in the toils, at Dr. Elphinstone’s—it’s the stone house at the right of the road leading north from Dry Bone—twenty miles, I think. I’ve bribed a man to take this to you, and if he fails me, God help me!—God help us all! If you fail me, you’ll never see me again—as Mary Allerton, because the Devil’s in charge here, and they call him the Jailer of Souls. I’ll be watching for you, at the south window—you’ll know it by the red ribbon on the bars. And now—be careful. If you get here at night beware of the guards—there are three. And if it’s night there’ll be a rope hanging from the window—you can feel for it in the dark. Now hurry._

“_MARY ALLERTON (No. 33)._”

“_You’ll never see me again—as Mary Allerton._” Annister was aware again of that crawling fear. “_The red ribbon on the bars._” The place was in effect a prison, then.

But—“_No. 33_”! Annister’s heart leaped up. He knew the meaning of those numerals well enough; he had been blind not to have suspected it. But “_Dr. Elphinstone_,” and “_The Jailer of Souls_!”

Who could be the jailer of souls but the Devil? And Annister fancied that he had seen the Devil at the corner of that street under the moon, with his black, forking beard, and the cold eyes of death.

The trail was warm now, as he thought, but—if he were too late? He put the thought from him, turning to the perusal of a telegram in code which he had found waiting for him at the desk; translated, it read:

“With you Thursday with four, six, twenty-one, and the others. Look for thirty-three.

“CHILDERS.”

But there was no time to be lost. Thursday was tomorrow. He would have to take his chance of their finding him, for there was nobody whom he could trust. Ellison had gone, even if he might have chanced the giant in so delicate a matter; Del Kane, likewise. He must take his chance. Striding to the door, he stiffened abruptly at a drumming rap, and a hoarse voice in the corridor without:

“Open up in there; open up!”

Annister, a pulse in his temple beating to his hard-held breath, jerked back the door, to face—

Bristow, behind him three men whom he recognized as hangers-on at the hotel bar. They had something of the look of long-riders, villainous, hard-bitten; as one man, they grinned now, but without mirth, as the sheriff spoke:

“Annister—I arrest you for the murder of Tucson Charlie Westervelt and Bartley Pattison. In th’ name of th’ Law!”

Annister knew that if he resisted they would shoot him down; in fact, he knew, too, that was what they wanted; it would be the easiest way. Under the menace of the guns, he spread his hands, palms downward, preceding the four men down the stairs outward to the jail.

But as the heavy door clanged shut behind him, Annister, his gaze in a sightless staring into the north, groaned, in bitterness of spirit.

Mary was needing him: she was in peril, the greater because it was unknown—and—he would not be there.

_CHAPTER ELEVEN_

THE HOUSE OF FEAR

A house of silence, broken at times by a weird wailing as from the Pit; a house of dreams, gray in the moonlight, under the leprous-silvered finger of the moon, brooding now, a grim, gray fortress of the damned: the stronghold of the Beast.

Dense pines grew about it, so that when the wind wailed among them, like the wailing of a lost soul, it met and mingled with an eerie ululation rising as if muffled by many thicknesses of walls, to end, after a little, with a quick shriek and a sudden hush, with, after a moment, the faint echo of a taunting laugh.

That laugh would have struck terror to the swart soul of a lucivee, if lucivees have souls, for it was like an eldritch howling, faint and thin; like the thin, tinkling laughter of a fiend, without pity and without ruth.

Here, in the sanitarium of Doctor Elphinstone, there were secrets within secrets, walls within walls, downward, as in Dante’s Seventh Hell, and from this monastery of the hopeless there penetrated, on occasion, outward from its battlemented walls, wild, frantic laughter, but there was nothing demoniac about it, because it was the laughter of the insane.

But that other laughter, like a sound heard in dreams—passers-by, if there were any such, hearing it, would shudder, and pass on. For the secret of that house of doom was a secret, terrible and grim; a secret, for him who might have guessed at it, to be whispered behind locked doors and with bated breath. And there had been those who had whispered of the lost souls within those walls, and the whisper ran that they were, indeed, madmen who had not been always mad, because—they had become such _after_ their commitment to the bleak house within the wood.

These were but whispers, merely, for the power upon that house was not alone the power of Evil, rising like a dark tide among the pines; for in Dry Bone, and beyond it, in Palos Verde and Mojave, it was rumored that the strong arm of the Law upheld it, or such law, say, as might have issued from the devious hand of Hamilton Rook.

Once—and it was never repeated—a man had come there from the capital; he had demanded to see the doctor’s patients; that had been a long time in the past.

And as the investigator had stood there, viewing with a faint, creeping horror the nondescripts paraded before him, gibbering, mouthing, in an inarticulate, furious babble, a man had burst suddenly from the line with a strangled cry:

“Jerry—don’t you know me? I’m Humiston—Newbold....”

The voice had been the voice of Humiston, but the face—it had been the face of another, totally unlike; there had been no possible resemblance. But the man had been—_sane_. The investigator was persuaded of that; suffering under a peculiar delusion, indeed, but sane.

The man had rushed forward then, baring his arm; and there, on that thin, pitiful flesh that had once been healthy and hard, there ran a curious design in red; the investigator sucked in his breath as that tell-tale birth-mark sprang, livid, under his gaze. For he had seen it before.

The doctor’s eyes had narrowed to slits; somehow, the man from the capital had gained the impression that it was the first time that he had seen that mark. But the investigator could do nothing. Birth-marks can be duplicated. He had waited then, in a curious indecision as the bearded doctor had interposed a suave:

“Well, of course, Commissioner, you’re quite aware, or you should be, how it is: these paranoiacs are noted for their delusions—ah—megalocephalic tendencies, I should say.... They believe themselves to be—someone else, and always a bank president, say, a famous actor, an author, a great general.... Now—Mr. Humiston—you knew him, I believe?” Beneath the silken tone there ran suddenly a hint of iron, of menace, veiled but actual; the investigator felt it. “This patient knew your name, of course,” the suave voice had continued. “Poor fellow—we must be gentle with him.”

And there the matter had ended. Curiously enough, the man who had claimed to be Banker Humiston had, after that first burst of frenzied speech, kept silent. Perhaps that mordant gleaming in the doctor’s eyes had telegraphed a warning, a message, a command.

But the investigator went home, oddly shaken, to dream, like Pilate’s wife, of a white face with staring eyes which changed, even as he gazed, into the face of his friend, Newbold Humiston; to hear, even in his dream, a voice, and it was the voice of the living, and of the dead.

* * * * *

In a bare cell, six feet by six—a cubicle in which there was barely sufficient head room for a tall man to stand upright—a figure stood with its hands clenched upon the bars, staring outward at the grim wood visible to the south.

Travis Annister had abode here in this living tomb three weeks now, three centuries, in which, as in a nightmare of cold horror, he had been aware merely of a face, three-pointed, bearded, the eyes active with a malign intelligence, the lips smiling always with the cold smile of death.

Twice a day the small panel in his cell door had slid backward without sound, to frame, in the opening, the face of Dr. Elphinstone, like a face without a body, and without a soul.

The father of Black Steve Annister knew that it was not a dream that would pass, because, on the second day, the head had spoken. Travis Annister was scarcely a coward; he had fought like a baited grizzly when surprised in his Summer camp by the men who had brought him, under cover of the night, to this prison-house beyond the pale.

Now, at the voice, like the slow drip of an acid, Annister stared straight before him, with the gaze of a man who has abandoned hope.

“My dear Mr. Annister,” the voice had whispered, “the little matter of that check, if you please.... You will make it out to ‘Cash’.... Ah, that is good; I perceive you are—wise.”

It had not been the pistol in the lean, clawlike hand; nor the eyes, even, brooding upon him with the impersonal, cold staring of a cobra; Travis Annister might have refused if it had not been for those sounds that he had heard, the sights that he had seen when, taken at midnight from his cubicle, he had beheld the administration of the Cone.

And, like Macbeth, with that one sight, and the sight of that which came after, he had “supped full of horrors,” until now, at the bidding of that toneless voice, he had obeyed. Three times thereafter, at the command of his dark jailer, he had paid tribute, nor had he been, of all that lost battalion, the single victim; there had been others....

Now, separated from him scarce a dozen feet, a girl with golden hair sat, huddled, eyes in a sightless staring upon the stone floor of her cell. Cleo Ridgley had not been killed; she had been saved for a fate—beside which death would be a little thing—a fate unspeakable, even as had—Number Thirty-three.

Mary Allerton, removed from the others by a narrow corridor running cross-wise in the cell-block, watched and waited now for the signal of the man to whom she had dispatched that message, it seemed, a century in the past.

That morning they had found the rope; they had removed it without comment, while the ophidian gaze of the dark Doctor had been bent upon her with what she fancied had been a queer, speculative look: a look of anticipation, and of something more. So far she had been treated decently enough; her cell was wide and airy, plainly but comfortably furnished; but as to that look in the gray-green eyes of the Master of Black Magic—she was not so sure.

There came a sudden movement in the corridor without; a panting, a snuffling, and the quick _pad-pad_ of marching feet. Mary, her eye to the keyhole of that door, could see but dimly; she made out merely the sheeted figures, like grim, gliding ghosts; the figure, rigid, on the stretcher, moving, silent, on its rubber-tired wheels. Then, at an odor stealing inward through the key-hole, she recoiled.

That perfume had been sickish-sweet, overpowering, dense and yet sharp with a faint, acrid sweetness; the odor of ether. And then, although she could not see it, a man in the next cell had risen, white-faced, from his cot, to sink back limply as the dark hand, holding that inverted cone, had swept downward to his face.

A choked gurgle, a strangled, sharp cry, penetrating outward in a vague shadow of clamor—and then silence, with the faint whisper of the wind among the pines, the brool of the rushing river, the faint, half-audible footfalls passing and repassing in that corridor of the dead.

* * * * *

Travis Annister sprang to his feet as the narrow door swung open to press backward against the window-bars as the High-Priest of Horror, followed by his familiars, cowled and hooded, entered with a slow, silent step. The Doctor spoke, and his voice was like a chill wind:

“My friend, I bring you—forgetfulness.... A brief Lethe of hours.... And then—ah, then, you will be a _new_ man, a man re-born, my friend.... Now....”

Annister, his face gray with a sort of hideous strain, stared silent, white-lipped, as, at a low-voiced order, the attendants came forward.

The lean hand reached forward; it poised, darted, swooped; and in it was the Cone.

_CHAPTER TWELVE_

CASTLE DANGEROUS

Alone in his cell beneath the court-house, Black Steve Annister sat in silence, gazing northward through the barred window to where, invisible in the thick darkness just across the street, the road ran, straight as an arrow from the bow, to that dark forest brooding in a changeless silence where lay the House of Fear.

Childers would have had his wire long since; but by the time that help could come it would be—too late. Annister, fatalistic after a fashion, felt this to be the fact even as he hoped against hope.

But they were many, and he was but one. Tomorrow—it would be too late.

Head bowed in his hands, oblivious, at first he had heard it as a thin whisper, like a knife blade against the silence; it penetrated inward now, with the dull rasp of metal upon metal from without:

“_Sit tight, old-timer; I’m comin’ through!_”

There came a muffled thud, a twist; Annister, reaching forth a hand, found it clasped in thick groping fingers. Then, as he thrust head and shoulders through the sundered bars, a Shadow uprose, gigantic, against the stars; the voice came again, in a quick, rumbling whisper:

“It’s me, old-timer—_Bull_.”

Annister, crawling through the opening, alighted upon soft turf. He heard Ellison’s low chuckle as, following the giant, he passed along the lee of the building to where, showing merely as a black blot against the night, there stood an automobile, its engine just turning over, with the low, even purr of harnessed power; at twenty paces it was scarcely audible above the rising of the wind.

“Tank’s full,” said Ellison. “Now—”

He turned abruptly as a dim figure rose upward just beyond. For a moment Annister set himself for the onslaught; then his hand went out; it gripped the hard hand of Del Kane.

“Ellison done told me, Mr. Annister,” he said. “An’ so I come a-fannin’ an’ a-foggin’ thisaway from Mojave; certain-sure I don’t aim to leave no friend of mine hog-tied in no calaboose!”

Annister, his heart warming to these friends, debated with himself; then turned to Ellison with a sudden movement.

“Bull,” he said. “I’m putting my cards on the table with you and Del, here.”

He told them briefly of the message from Mary, the need of haste; then, of his mission, and of the help that was even now due, or would be, with the morning. If they were coming with him, northward along that road of peril, word must be left behind.

Kane thought a moment; then, wheeling swiftly, with muttered word, he disappeared in the darkness, to return presently with the good news that he had fixed it with the station-agent. The latter had just come on; he was a friend of Kane’s, and no friend of Rook and Company; he would see to it, Kane said, that the reinforcements would be warned.

Boarding the car, they swung out cautiously along the silent street, under the pale stars, northward along that shadowy road. Presently there would be a moon, but just now they went onward in a thick darkness, with, just ahead, the dim loom of the road, flowing backward under the wheels, which presently ran like a ribbon of pale flame under the bright beam of the lights.

A half mile from the town, and Bull, who was driving, opened up, and the car leaped forward with the rising drone of the powerful motor, thirty, forty, fifty miles an hour; the wind of their passage drove backward like a wall as the giant’s voice came now in a rumbling laugh:

“Some little speed-wagon, Mr. Annister, ha?” he said. “An’ that’s whatever! It ought to be. The man who owns it—who _did_ own it half an hour ago—he’s some particular, I’ll say! Because—it’s Mister Hamilton Rook’s!”

Annister laughed grimly in answer, speaking a low word of caution as, after perhaps a half hour of their racing onrush the lights glimmered on dark trees to right and left.

“Somewhere about here, I think,” he said, low. “Three outside guards, I understand. We’d better stop a little way this side, Bull ... that’s it. Now, look!”

As the big car slid slowly to a halt, the moon, rising above the trees, showed them, perhaps a hundred yards just ahead, a low, rambling, stone house, its windows like blind eyes to the night. Upon its roof the moonlight lay like snow, and even at that distance it was sinister, forbidding, as if the evil that was within had seeped through those stones, outward, in a creeping tide.

“Looks like a morgue,” offered Ellison, with a shrug of his great shoulders, as the three, alighting, pushed the car before them into the wood.

Then, guns out, they went forward slowly among the trees.

Annister had formed no definite plan of attack. The red ribbon at that window-bar might or might not be visible under the moon, but, the guards eliminated, it seemed to him that, after all, they would have to make it an assault in force. Pondering this matter, of a sudden he leaped sidewise as a dim figure rose upward almost in his face.

Spread-eagled like a bat against the dimness, the figure bulked, huge, against the moon as Annister, bending to one side, brought up his fist in a lifting punch, from his shoe-tops.

It was a savage blow; it landed with the sound of a butcher’s cleaver on the chopping-block; there came a gasping grunt; the thud of a heavy body, as the guard went downward without a sound.

“One!” breathed Ellison, as, trussing their victim with a length of stout line brought from the car, they left him, going forward carefully, keeping together, circling the house.

But it was not until they were half way round it, with, so far, no sign of that signal for which he looked, that they encountered the second guard.

He came upon them with a swift, silent onrush, leaping among the trees, a great, dun shape, spectral under the moon, fangs bared, as, without a sound, the hound drove straight for the giant’s throat.

A shot would bring discovery; they dared not risk it. Annister could see the great head, the wide ruff at the neck, the grinning jaws.... Then, the giant’s hands had gone up and out; there came a straining heave, a wrench, a queer, whistling croak; Ellison, rising from his knees, looked downward a moment to where the beast, its jaw broken by that mighty strength, lay stretched, lifeless, at his feet.

By now they had come full circle, when, all at once, Annister, peering under his hand, sucked in his breath with a whispered oath.

Fair against the bars of a window, low down at their right, there was a dark smudge; the ribbon, black under the moon. Annister’s heart leaped up in answer, as, with a quick word, he halted his companions in the shadow of a tree. A moment they conferred; then Ellison—and Annister could almost see his grin in the darkness—spoke beneath his hand:

“Why, that’ll be easy! I’ve got m’ tools; they’re right here in my pocket, Mr. Annister! Those bars ought to be easy! For a fair journeyman sledge-swinger, it’ll be easy an’ you can lay to that!”

“Good!” whispered Annister in answer. “But—hurry!”